Thought: Authors Withholding Info.

The title of this post seems a whole lot more sinister than I meant it to. I don’t even mean mystery authors, really. Who I mean is Tanya Huff, and her newest book The Enchantment Emporium.

Going along with the theme of talking about books I’ve read recently, yes, I just read this book. (I thought it was fantastic, by the way, so if anyone is looking for a really neat fantasy book to read, I highly recommend this book.) And by far the most interesting thing about this book was the author’s way of divulging information. We’ve all heard of the dreaded “info dumps” and been told not to do them. The phrase that I’ve heard often is that info should be “slipped in like spice.” (No Dune puns intended, I believe.) I’m not sure that info dumps aren’t something an author should do, necessarily, as I’ve seen them used well.

But this book.

Tanya Huff seems to mostly just assume that the reader knows what’s going on. Or that if they don’t, they’ll just sit tight and piece together the small clues until we have something that vaguely resembles a Big Picture. For instance, the Gales—the main family in The Enchantment Emporium—is a family of magic users. The reader sort of gets a hint at that in the beginning, but there’s no description of what type of magic, of how they use their magic, how their magic differs from those they oppose, nothing. (With the sole exception of one character, but even that is vague.) It’s not until way into the meat of the book that someone actually uses their magic and it’s up to the reader to catch it and work it out in their mind and decide what just happened.

I loved it. And it made me think about what sort of things the author has to tell their readers. Part of writing a compelling story is, in a lot of ways, withholding information to begin with. That’s how you get to the climax. But somewhere there’s a line. You know, a really fuzzy line that no one can really discern—until, maybe, you’ve already crossed it.

But it made me think about some of my own writing. Maybe you don’t need to explain how your magic system works. Maybe you don’t have to explain why the world is the way it is. And, hell, would that make writing or world building any easier?

(I ought to mention, also, that a big part of loving this book was all the geeky references. I know I didn’t catch them all, and I still caught a lot of them. There was a whole list of “Jacks” at one point, and the list absolutely included Captain Jack Sparrow and Captain Jack Harkness. That’s the only geek reference I remember, but I know there were bunches more. It was awesome. I almost want to get my own copy and read it again so that I can highlight all the geek references.)

Thought: Large Ensemble Casts.

I recently finished Laurell K. Hamlton’s newest Anita Blake Vampire Hunter book, Bullet. If you don’t know, the main character of this book has… ok, at least a dozen “boyfriends” and for mystical purposes she must have sex with them all the time. (Yeah, I don’t…. even.) That’s not really the important part. The important part is that there are countless numbers of characters in this series.

There seem to be three ways of dealing with the problem of creating massive casts of characters: for the moment I will call them the Laurell K. Hamilton Method (LKH Method) and the Robert Jordan Method (RJ Method) and the George R.R. Martin Method (GRRM Method).

LKH Method: In the reading of Bullet, I noticed that two characters that I personally care about a lot—but who were almost non-existent in the previous few books—were suddenly important main characters and in the center of the action! They just… disappeared, until she had a need for them—or until a fan reminded her that she hadn’t said anything about them in a while.

While nice to see those characters, it was jarring. What the hell happened to them in the mean time? Why were they suddenly important now, when they hadn’t been for several books before?

RJ Method: (Please note that I haven’t read The Wheel of Time series, but that I have several close friends with whom I have discussed it.) Famously, one of Robert Jordan’s last books took place over the span of 23 hours, because he had so many characters that were all over the place, doing things that were relevant to the plot.

I can understand the impetus to make sure that all of one’s characters are accounted for and seen to be doing useful things, but it made for a long, and yet also short book. I make no judgments here since, as I said, I haven’t read the books. But somehow this strikes me as awkward.

GRRM Method: These books I have read. And yes, they are long and the plots are epic and inspiring, and the cast of characters is vast and covers two separate continents. But somehow, Martin manages to maneuver this territory with deceptively easy grace. For those who don’t know, Martin’s books are written in a switching POV style. You get a chapter from one character, then a chapter from another, and so on and so forth. There are lots of them, and the POVs are only sometimes consistent from book to book (by which I mean that just because someone is a narrator in the first book doesn’t mean that you should expect to see them in the second).

In his last book, instead of making it eight bazillion pages long, he split his characters into groups: North and South (I believe). The book that was released contained the stories of the characters in the North (I think, maybe it’s South, it’s been a while since I read it) and spans a certain period of time. When the next book comes out, it will be the characters that weren’t included in the book before it, but it will cover the same span of time in the story as the previous book.

It was stroke of genius (both as a writing tool and as a marketing ploy)! The plot marches merrily along, and the readers greedily gobbled up the characters’ thoughts and actions and then sat back to await the next book. Because we were still missing characters. While Martin handles his large cast of characters very well in his first three books, I thought the method faltered a bit.

To Sum Up: I have no idea how an author “should” handle a large ensemble. In fact, I suspect that the methods that these authors have chosen works for them—it’s just the readers who are left flailing in the abyss. (I will state for the record that I don’t think that authors should write for their readers—they should write what they want to and hope their readers will enjoy it.) It’s just that the methods chosen by these particular authors leave me wondering… why they created that many characters to begin with, and if they planned on using the methods they chose.

Still, my personal method? Don’t create more characters than I can reasonably keep track of.

Thought: World Building.

I’ve been slacking off in the Thinking-About-Writing arena these days—but I have a good excuse: school. But now that summer is here, and I’m reading books for fun again, I’m starting to have things to say about them and about writing in general.

So here’s today’s thought: World Building is hard.

I’ve created several worlds for various novels I thought I wanted to write, and I would never say that any of the worlds I created were really able to sustain story. Sure, I had different races, I had the ruling families, I even had some of the history. But as I wrote, I had to keep making new things up, finding little bits and pieces about the world that even I, the writer, didn’t know. Now maybe that’s just how I do it. Hell, maybe that’s how other people do it too, but it struck me as… well, not quite complete.

Looking at someone like—and you all must know who I’m going to say here—Tolkien, it’s easy to see that world building could be hard. Even now, decades after his death, books are still being released of more stories from his Middle Earth. He created a wealth of information about a world that he thought up in his head, a world whose history spans millennia. And he knew what happened in all those years. (I think about this sometimes and I despair of ever writing anything good ever.) It’s incredible. Not that someone could do that, but the sheer amount of things he created for his world is utterly amazing.

But then I read things like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn and Warbreaker. And I have hope again. Not because the books or their world building are bad, but because they’re good. Maybe it’s that they lack the sense of the epic that Tolkien’s books have, but I’m not sure that’s quite it. What I do know is that the worlds of both books are beautifully thought out. That the reader (or at least I) never wondered about something that was left out. Because nothing seemed to be left out at all.

As a writer, I’m left wondering this: how much does the writer need to know about the world before they can write something without holes? Does the writer know a whole lot more than ends up in the book? How much history does the writer have to invent before their world feels like it has some history? Or is it all up to the writer’s skill in mending those little holes so no one sees them?

I am, of course, thinking about this more and more because I plan on using this summer for writing. Lots and lots of writing. I look forward to telling you all about it as I find my way through it.

Thought: Vampires in High School.

Here’s something I don’t get. (And this is definitely something I’ve talked to some people about, so maybe this won’t be a surprise to some of you.) If you’re a vampire, and you’re going to live forever, why would you go to high school more than once?

The Twilight Saga is definitely a prime example of this, but I know that the Vampire Kisses series also had a vampire in high school. I can only imagine that the countless teen vampire books have a few vampires in high school. I liked high school and I wouldn’t want to be there for the rest of eternity. College–of which I have attended two–I would probably gladly attend for the rest of my life. Imagine all the graduate degrees and doctorates I could acquire! (Seriously, if they find a way to make me immortal sometimes in the next 5 years, I’m totally going with that plan.)

I know that YA fiction generally focuses on teens–those who are somewhere between the ages of (in my experience) 15 and 17. But I don’t believe it. No one wants to attend high school more than once.

There’s a market for books about college students. I’m going to get on that. Go forth and write.

Thought: Writer’s Block, Pt. 2

It ought to be noted, that I broke my writer’s block this past November. It took something like three years, but I did it. Finally.

I still firmly believe that writer’s block is not a writer being lazy, like some people seem to think. I don’t believe that it’s a facet of a writer’s imagination–that if they think they’re blocked, then they are. I do believe that it has something to do with motivation and, yes, inspiration. In my case, it seem to be tied to my emotions as well. I spent significant parts of 2008 and 2009 being seriously depressed, and I am sure that factored into my inability to write.

But in the end, all I really needed was the right motivation to get over it: jealousy. As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month. And it only took nine words from my boyfriend to get me going again: “I think I’m going to do NaNoWriMo this year.” To be utterly fair, I don’t think it was purely jealousy on my part. I think it was also fear–fear that I was somehow going to get left behind in the wake of his creativity and his determination. And also that I would somehow lose what made me Me. If he was the writer, then who was I?

Anyway, I am happy to announce that I have conquered the beast and lived.

My only problem now is what to write first! But oh, it’s nice to be thinking like a writer again.